Finance Clever

If you track your expenses, you probably already know that cars are pretty expensive things to own. After you account for depreciation, gas, maintenance and repairs, property taxes, and everything else, you can easily be spending between $2,000 to $15,000 per year. I think we have done a decent job at optimizing our vehicle choices and even then each of our vehicles cost more than $2,000 per year. Use the links below if you want to see the breakdown of those costs for our own cars: Elisa’s car ($2,150 per year) Juan’s previous car ($2,216 per year) Back in September … Read more…

The second quarter of 2017 flew by as the days got warmer and longer. I must say, spring is one of my favorite times of the year as I’m not a big fan of cold and short days (see Q1 expenses here). It was generally a quiet quarter though we had family visiting us in April, and we traveled to Colombia late in June. Let’s dive right into our expenses for the second quarter of the year. The table above summarizes our expenses for the first three month of the year from highest to lowest. Let’s explore the bigger and … Read more…

You get it, financial independence that is. You can’t wait to start building some serious wealth to buy your freedom. You understand that being financially independent will allow you to spend ALL of your time, not just weekends and holidays, doing whatever YOU choose. You are pumped and eager to start working on making your dream a reality. There is just one problem… your partner is not board. I will use the term partner here to refer to a spouse, fiancé, fiancée, or any serious significant other in your life. I’m lucky, my wife was on board with financial independence … Read more…

The first three months of 2017 were relatively uneventful compared to our action-packed 2016. We spent a lot of time at home with our little one, and I kept myself pretty busy with work, and studying for the last CPA exam, which I’m glad to say is behind me as I passed all 4 parts! Without further introduction, here are all of our expenses for the first three months of 2016! Let’s dive into the bigger and more interesting items. Travel: the travel category includes the cost of obtaining a passport for our daughter, about $190 of embassy fees for me … Read more…

At this point in my life, I have read about a dozen books on money management and investing. I have found most of them to be fairly interesting and have learned a lot from them. But unfortunately, the great majority of sane people would find them boring and tedious, they are. I say unfortunately not because I want everybody to be a finance nerd like me, but because I believe that having a solid understanding of money and its intricacies is one of the most powerful tools you can use to thrive and live a great life in this modern world we live in. I need … Read more…

2016 was a really exiting year for us! We kicked off the year by traveling back to the U.S. after our wedding. A few months later I finished grad school, and attended Camp Mustache to kick off the summer. My dad came to visit us towards the end of the summer and we took him to the U.S. Open. As the fall season kicked in I started my new job, we bought a house, and we welcomed our beautiful baby daughter into the family! Definitely the highlight of the year 🙂 One would think a year like this would cost a fortune, and it certainly could … Read more…

A number of questions have come up from the post I wrote a few weeks ago about buying our new home. One of the most frequent ones goes something like this: “Great job outlining the costs of homeownership, but what about the benefits? I get a tax deduction for the interest and property taxes I pay on my home!” Today, we put the above statement to the test. Are potential tax deductions actually valuable for home owners? Of course we cannot do this without a basic understanding of the U.S. tax system. So here is a quick high level crash course*. Let’s start with the basic income tax formula: As you can see we … Read more…

About a year ago I wrote about how Elisa’s car has saved us $26,200 over 4 years. Today, we’ll explore the numbers behind my own car. As I am writing this sentence, I have not yet run the numbers so I am excited to see how my car’s cost of ownership compares to Elisa’s. I bought this car back in 2011 when I moved to Greensboro, NC for graduate school. I had about $6,000 to my name, and even though I didn’t know about financial independence back then, I knew that borrowing money for a car was a bad idea. I … Read more…

One of the most common misconceptions out there is the notion that buying a home is always a better financial decision than renting one. This is nonsense. “Always” is rarely a good answer in the world of personal finance. There are too many factors at play for one alternative to always trump the other ones. A common argument in favor of buying that clearly overlooks many important factors goes something like this: “my mortgage payment would be roughly the same as my rent payment. Therefore, I should buy because I’m building equity!“. Not unreasonable, but awfully incomplete. With that in mind, let’s take a look at … Read more…

Who are the rich in this country? What do they do? How did they get rich? Can I become one of them? The Millionaire Next Door provides some very interesting and, perhaps, surprising answers to these questions. The authors, Dr. Stanley and Dr. Danko, are two academics who have dedicated much of their time to study millionaires, and the research behind this book is very comprehensive. The opening paragraph of the book is very insightful and provides a great preview of all the good stuff that follows: “Twenty years ago we began studying how people became wealthy. Initially, we did … Read more…